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A Twin Victory for Transparency in Federal Judicial Misconduct Proceedings

Posted by judicialethicsforum on Friday, January, 24, 2014

To the credit of the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability (of the Judicial Conference of the United States), it just issued two opinions refusing to hide judicial misconduct. The first involved former Chief Judge Cebull (D. Mont.) who had forwarded hundreds of racist, sexist, homophobic, and political emails from his court email address. Because of an intervening event (namely, Judge Cebull’s decision to retire), the Ninth Circuit Judicial Council had effectively redacted portions of its earlier order detailing Judge Cebull’s misconduct and imposing several sanctions. The Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability concluded that the Council had erred and republished the full order here.

The second instance involved former Sixth Circuit Chief Judge Boyce Martin who had asked the Judicial Council to remove his name from its published order and not to refer him to the Department of Justice for further investigation into his problematic travel reimbursements. In the face of the judicial misconduct investigation, Martin retired and agreed to pay back $138,500 in reimbursements. Notwithstanding these steps, the Committee saw no reason to overturn the Judicial Council’s decision to publish Martin’s name and to refer the misconduct to prosecutors; see here.

[Somewhat ironically for a post applauding the federal judiciary’s transparency of late, the website on which it posts its decisions has been unavailable several times over the past few days. The links above are therefore courtesy of other websites.]